Chapter 66: Shadows Fighting Shadows (Part 1)

The Shadow Panther’s next target was the leader.

Zion shifted his attention toward the far-left route of the maze and found him walking calmly through another dimly lit corridor.

Unlike the other two, he did not seem rushed. His dagger remained lowered at his side while his eyes moved between the walls, floor, and patches of darkness ahead.

Then he suddenly stopped and turned his head slightly to the right.

"Riggs... Lambert..."

His hand tightened around the dagger while his expression changed enough that Zion could clearly read it.

He was angry. Not panicked or afraid. Just angry.

Zion tilted his skull. "He can tell?"

The other two had been defeated several chambers away. There had been no shouting loud enough to carry this far, and Zion had not seen any obvious communication between them.

Still, the leader clearly knew. He remained still for a few seconds before continuing forward with even more focus than before.

Zion shrugged. "Definitely a cult or something."

Whatever they were, apparently they had some way of knowing when one of their own disappeared.

A short distance ahead waited one of Zion’s favorite traps on the entire floor, and his mood brightened almost immediately.

The next chamber was large and square, with rows of stone tiles covering the floor from wall to wall. The exit sat directly opposite the entrance, marked by a single weak torch that made the room look almost inviting.

The floor was the important part.

Every few seconds, the mechanism selected a tile at random and dropped it into the pit below. There was no pressure plate, tripwire, predictable order, or mechanism an adventurer could simply kneel beside and dismantle.

Zion had spent far more essence on it than he wanted to remember. Even with the forty-percent trap sale, it had still hurt.

But this was exactly why.

"You can’t pick this one apart."

The leader stopped at the entrance and spent nearly a minute studying the chamber without stepping inside. Apparently, his instincts were good enough to recognize that something about the room was wrong.

What he could not see were the rows of metal spikes filling the pit beneath the tiles. Zion had reused the cheaper spike traps he liked so much, placing enough of them below that falling through would almost certainly count as a defeat.

Unless someone could fly, they were going to have a very bad time.

Zion checked the instance map.

The Shadow Panther was already there, waiting somewhere inside one of the darker corners of the chamber. His grin widened.

"This should be good."

For several seconds, neither the leader nor the Panther moved.

Then the leader finally stepped inside. His boot touched the first tile, but nothing happened.

Zion clicked his tongue. "Tsk. Lucky."

The man waited before stepping onto the next one.

Still nothing.

Zion watched with the same nervous anticipation he might have felt waiting for the result of some kind of game show.

"Come on..."

The leader moved onto a third tile. This time, the stone shifted beneath his foot. His body vanished immediately and reappeared on the previous tile just as the one ahead dropped into the pit and shattered against the spikes below.

The leader stared down at the opening, and his eyes narrowed.

Zion noticed the change immediately. He had thought of something.

"What? Did you figure something out?"

The man extended one foot toward the tile beside the opening and pressed against it lightly. The stone loosened almost immediately, so he pulled back before putting his full weight on it and watched the tile drop away.

He tested two more nearby tiles the same way, and both fell.

Zion slowly sat up.

"What are you doing?"

The man continued deliberately triggering the surrounding tiles without committing enough weight to fall with them. One by one, the stones around his position disappeared until a wide gap surrounded the tile beneath his feet.

Zion stared at him. "You’re making it worse for yourself."

There was barely a path forward anymore. If he wanted to reach the other side now, he would have to jump.

The leader looked across the gaps and seemed to realize the same thing. A faint frown crossed his face.

Zion smiled. "Yeah. Not so clever now, are you?"

The Shadow Panther remained hidden somewhere in the chamber, apparently content to wait.

The leader lowered his body slightly and jumped. The instant his boots touched the next tile, the Panther burst from the darkness beside him.

He jumped again before his weight fully settled, and the claws passed inches behind his back.

Zion settled in his seat. "Oh, this is good."

The leader landed two tiles farther ahead, but the Panther had already disappeared into another patch of darkness.

He barely had enough time to steady himself before it attacked again.

The two began crossing the chamber in a strange chase. Every time the leader jumped or teleported across a gap, the Panther slipped through the darkness after him, forcing him to keep moving before he could properly test the next tile.

Then one of the stones shifted beneath his foot. His leg dropped slightly before his body vanished, reappearing several meters away just as the tile collapsed beneath him. The Panther’s claws cut through the space where his chest had been.

Zion gripped the armrest. "They’re actually fighting in the middle of the trap."

This was easily the best thing Floor 3 had produced so far.

During the next exchange, the leader finally stopped retreating. The Panther emerged beside him, and his dagger flashed across its shoulder before the beast could disappear again. It recoiled with a snarl.

The leader jumped backward to create distance, but the movement carried him almost all the way toward the chamber entrance.

Zion looked across the floor.

Large sections were missing now. Every tile the leader had intentionally triggered earlier had made the route across much harder, and the gap between him and the exit was wider than before.

The Shadow Panther stepped out of the darkness with its body lowered and tense enough that even Zion could tell it was angry.

"Uh-oh."

It attacked again, and although the leader vanished before the claws reached him, the pace of the fight changed immediately. There was no time to test the floor anymore. Every time his feet touched a tile, the Panther was already moving toward him.

Then the beast adjusted. Instead of appearing where the leader stood, it emerged where he was about to land.

Zion’s eye sockets widened. "It learned too!"

The leader realized it a moment too late. The Panther slammed into him before he could recover and launched him sideways into the wall hard enough to crack the sandstone.

Then the wall broke.

Both Zion and the leader froze as a section of stone collapsed inward and revealed darkness behind it. Zion recognized the location immediately.

"Oh. You really are lucky."

That was the hidden passage leading toward the Glittering Treasure room.